Situational Overview
The Sprawl has seasons. Not the kind planets have — the sealed megastructure has no natural weather. No axis tilt, no orbital eccentricity, no monsoon winds off distant oceans. What it has is markets.
The Processing Season is the annual cycle of compute activity that determines the data weather, the thermal conditions, and the quality of life for everyone who lives in the infrastructure’s shadow. When the Cognitive Exchange ramps up behavioral prediction processing in Q2, the heat rises. When consciousness futures mature in Q4, the cascades follow. The weather is made by financial calendars. The seasons are fiscal quarters. The climate is a market function.
This is the Scarcity Doctrine’s calendar — the annual rhythm of artificially maintained scarcity, written in temperature readings and fog density and the population count at the Cold Corridor.
The Four Quarters
“The Breathing”
The quiet season. The Shadow cools to 26–28°C. The fog lifts. Interfaces work without lag spikes. For three months, Dregs residents can see three blocks instead of one.
This is the closest to clean air the Shadow ever gets. Pencil-47 takes vacation. Markets are calm. The heat exchangers catch up. People sleep through the night without waking in sweat. Children play in corridors they can’t see through the rest of the year.
Shadow temp: 26–28°C • Fog probability: <15% • Drought risk: minimal
The Escalation
Gradual. Behavioral prediction processing increases as the Exchange ramps toward mid-year targets. Fog probability rises from 30% to 50%. The Three-Day Memorial’s neural ceremonies produce a characteristic thermal spike — thousands of consciousness patterns broadcasting simultaneously, the infrastructure straining under the weight of collective grief.
Experienced Shadow residents start stockpiling. They know what comes next.
Shadow temp: 28–31°C • Fog probability: 30–50% • Drought risk: rising
Peak Processing
The Shadow reaches 32–34°C. Fog exceeds 70%. Droughts are frequent — compute resources diverted to corporate processing, leaving Shadow districts throttled and rationed. The Cold Corridor doubles in population as thermal refugees crowd into the only naturally cooled passage in the lower Sprawl.
Pencil-47’s forecasts become essential. The difference between knowing a drought is coming two hours early and learning about it when your interface dies — that’s the difference between preparation and panic.
Shadow temp: 32–34°C • Fog probability: 70%+ • Drought risk: frequent
Storm Season
Consciousness futures mature. Settlement processing peaks. Harmonic cascade risk reaches its annual maximum. This is when the worst weather happens — not because October is inherently dangerous, but because the financial calendar says this is when debts come due and markets settle accounts.
Every major compute climate tragedy has occurred in Q4. Every one. The forced-focus workers know it. The Shadow residents know it. The thermal refugees packed into the Cold Corridor know it. The weather that kills people follows the same calendar that determines corporate earnings.
Shadow temp: 33–36°C • Fog probability: 80%+ • Cascade risk: highest
Operational Consequences
The Processing Season frames every other entity in the compute climate constellation. Nothing in the Shadow operates independently of this cycle.
- The Thermal Shadow’s temperature follows it — a lagging indicator of market activity measured in degrees and mortality.
- Droughts cluster in Q3–Q4, when corporate demand outstrips infrastructure capacity and the lowest-priority users get cut first.
- Pencil-47’s forecast complexity tracks the season — simple in Q1, life-or-death in Q3.
- The Power Auction’s prices reflect it — energy costs triple between Q1 and Q4.
- The Dregs plan their lives around it. Marriage season is Q1. Nobody schedules surgery in Q4.
- Forced-focus workers dread Q4 — the heaviest processing loads, the worst thermal conditions, the highest risk of neural overload.
The Questions Nobody Answers
If the weather is made by markets, who decided the markets should make weather?
The Cognitive Exchange could distribute processing loads evenly across the year. The technology exists. The infrastructure supports it. Q4 storm season is not an engineering constraint — it’s a financial one. Settlement processing peaks in Q4 because that’s when the fiscal calendar says it peaks. The calendar was written by people who don’t live in the Shadow.
The Scarcity Doctrine says scarcity is maintained “for system stability.” The Processing Season is what that stability looks like from below: four months of relief, four months of rising dread, four months of endurance.
Nobody ever voted on the fiscal calendar. Nobody in the Dregs was consulted about when consciousness futures should mature. The weather that determines whether your children can breathe follows a schedule set by people who have never felt fog on their skin.
Sensory Profile
Q1 — Relief
The air clears. The haze lifts. You can see three blocks instead of one. The corridors feel wider because you can see the walls. The temperature drops to something a human body can tolerate without adaptation. Children discover what their neighborhood looks like. Some of them have never seen it clearly before.
Q2 — The Build
A taste of copper returns to the back of the throat. The fog doesn’t arrive all at once — it creeps. One morning the far wall of the corridor is slightly blurred. The next week, the blur has moved twenty meters closer. The heat doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates. You notice it in the sweat, not the air.
Q3 — Siege
The air thickens until it has weight. The heat builds until the walls sweat. The fog closes in until the world shrinks to the space between your outstretched arms. Interfaces stutter. Voices sound muffled. The smell of overworked cooling systems — hot metal and recycled coolant — becomes the dominant scent of daily life.
Q4 — Dread
Every forced-focus worker, every Shadow resident, every thermal refugee knows that the worst weather comes when the markets settle. The sound changes — the baseline hum of infrastructure shifts frequency as processing loads peak. The air tastes of ozone. The fog turns from grey to amber as thermal density distorts the light. You wait. Everyone waits.
▲ Restricted Access
Unverified intelligence suggests the Cognitive Exchange has modeled alternative processing schedules that would eliminate Q4 storm season entirely. The models exist. They have been circulated internally. They have never been implemented.
Reasons cited in the leaked assessment: “Seasonal scarcity drives predictable consumer behavior. Predictable consumer behavior reduces market volatility. Reduced volatility increases quarterly returns.”
The Processing Season is not an accident. It is a design choice. The storms are a feature.